Juan Villoro
Health only exists when we lose it. Under normal circumstances, we do not realize that we are breathing. Illness represents an opportunity to value a healthy body and even to understand the world differently. The elongated figures of El Greco are attributed to a possible defect of sight and the mystical apparitions witnessed by Hildegard von Bingen to a possible migraine with aura. Each discomfort provokes compensation. Who knows what Beethoven would have composed if he had kept his hearing?
Beyond its ravages, the coronavirus brought the rare benefit of reminding us that there is a human presence. Before the pandemic, we simply went to a place without realizing that it was a ” physical presence “. Evil subjected us to a dilemma: to appear virtually or in the archaic third dimension. In most cases, we preferred the second option. It is not strange that rock festivals reached a renewed frenzy during the truce granted by the pandemic. Still, even philosophy symposiums have assumed an intensity, if not of rave, at least of the reasoned hedonism that Epicurus preached in his Garden. Indeed, next Día del Grito in Mexico, the plazas will be full, not out of tricolor patriotism, but for the unrenounceable pleasure of being together and even squashed together. The social being needs to have his ribs pecked.
In this context of recovery of presence, few activities are as significant as theater. A book can wait to have readers, and a painter can die without knowing that years later, his paintings will produce a fortune in Sotheby’s. On the other hand, the theater plays all its cards during the performance. When it fails, the disaster is total. Cinema allows secondary distractions; if the film is bad, we concentrate on the scenery, the beauty of an actress, a car on the run, or the suggestive music of Ennio Morricone. We are even entertained by what the characters eat (a paradox of Italian mafia films is that they whet the appetite; the blood spilled does not prevent us from leaving the theater craving spaghetti).
The theater does not admit these distractions. If we are not convinced by what is happening, it is useless for the actors to do acrobatics or for the scenery to spin like a carousel. We are before an essential decanting of presence, a form of a rite that aspires to catharsis, to communion with the audience.
It is not by chance that the word “persona”, which we owe to the Etruscans, means “actor’s mask” because theater is not a simulation, but an incarnation of identities, which, of course, extends to the mask itself, which reveals more than it hides. It is not a disguise but an investiture. In the forums of classical Greece, masks eliminated all ambiguity: that of Comedy smiled, and that of Tragedy wept.
In the carnival of Venice, people do not assume the masks of Harlequin or Columbine to pretend, but to express what they dare not say otherwise. “Give a man a mask, and he will tell the truth,” wrote the incontrovertible Oscar Wilde. The mask is not concealment, but an attribute of identity, as we know from El Santo, Superbarrio, or Subcomandander Marcos (now Galeano). Eloquently, in Batman Returns, The Penguin tells the Night Watchman: “I love the frankness of a masked man”.
The masks of classic theater expressed personalities so genuinely that people accepted being defined as a “person.”
All this is to celebrate the actors’ return to the stage. To rehearse, they recover their former masked condition and wear masks. It is challenging to work in these conditions, listening to the muffled voices without seeing the gestures of their colleagues. To make matters worse, contagion in the cast suspends rehearsals and performances. And once the premiere is over, you have to face an audience in a mask whose reactions you can’t see. Are they smiling, enjoying themselves, or bored? It is impossible to know.
Despite so many impediments, the theater, the person’s inspiration, has raised the curtain again. The pleasure of being there after months of isolation is so great that sometimes the audience applauds at the third call. That doesn’t mean that the show is starting, but that life is coming back.
This piece was published in Spanish on August 5, 2022, by Reforma.